In past posts, we talked about Inner Source and the benefits for your organization. Some large organizations, such Paypal or Zalando started their own process to approach Inner Source; we can say without a doubt that each of them has taken their own path, because Inner Source is more related to a philosophy or enterprise culture than to a process or static methodology defining it.

Bitergia participated in the last LinuxTag event in Berlin that brought together the industry and FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) communities in the same event.

I had the pleasure to present the basics of the analysis of FLOSS communities from a quantitative point of view, specifically focusing on the analysis of companies. Openstack was the project selected as a case study, where volunteers and companies are working together to build an open source software to build public or private clouds.

Among other questions,

Main developers

Understand who are the main developers: a company could be interested in hiring them or providing some financial support for specific activities.

Typical patterns of activity: in order to guess the effort that is being actually developed.

Regeneration of developers: turnover is almost impossible to avoid, but some policies could be derived in order to avoid knowledge loss.

Study of companies participating: some companies could be interested in better understanding what other companies are doing and the regions of the source code that they are modifying. Or even their importance in terms of number of developers and overall productivity.

Responsiveness of the community: when fixing issues in the source code, process is usually undertaken in the issue tracking systems or for instance, support provided in the mailing lists or forums.

Evolution of licensing and issues derived from them: this is probably a key difficulty when redistributing source code and integrating third part software

Orphaned areas of the source code that might be more prone to be buggy as well as low maintained areas of the source code.

Bitergia, the software development analytics company

Bitergia is focused on software development analytics. We aim to produce useful information about how software projects are performing, how different actors are contributing and how they could be improved.

We provide tools and means to track all these aspects, and to evaluate how policies and decisions are shaping the development processes.